I am not drunk yet, though of course I don’t really get drunk, not without help, though at least I am actually sober, which is more than I could say for the last time I did this, with a lot less aplomb on a crystalline November eve seven or eight years previous. Here I am, standing with a bunch of people, ostensibly strangers, few of us even sharing our first names for fear of what some psycho madman might do, and yet we’re pledging to the public not only to help protect them, but to be each other’s back-up as well. It’s like a bizarre wedding. No wonder the cops sometimes hate us, peacocks in our skin-tight teasing costumes. Yes the latex and lycra and leather really are that much better to fight in, or more aerodynamic, or help make our physiques strike fear into the hearts of the bad guys, or whatever the hell the dominant explanation has become. And unless you’re like me and feeling somewhat over this weird scene before its even truly begun already, then you’re straining at the leash, drunk already without a hint of champagne popped thanks to this fantasy of power and perfection unwrapped as a gaudy non-secret before the media, a few friends and half the world.
I don’t think they are glued to their screens in Africa. Or well, at least not outside the silver corporate towers of the Zion city state. Otherwise, there’s no greater show on Earth than the stampeding cavalcade as Seeker and I mock-compere the denouement of this spectacle of our own orchestration.
And the star-gazing fuckers lap it up. Flies could settle on their eyes, they’re so teary with excitement and absorbed in the cattle-call of new and old faces, famous all. Mastodon. Vulcana. Samurai Girl. Nocturne. Smidgeon. Hmmm, I’m forgetting one. Oh, and Brasseye (as we reluctantly agreed to let him be known). Call me cynical or clinically depressed, but this grand unveiling feels more like an abattoir for the culturally deranged, an outdoor asylum, all sense of scale and proportion gone. If we matter at all, it’s not like this, should never have been allowed to become like this, even if the alternative is dying in some foreign field forgotten except for a flower that grows each year, a real sacrifice, a real purpose, a justifiable honorific for a challenge met and an effort made.
Instead, I have to make sure I slip in the names of our sponsors as I ad lib my way down the carpeted stairs to the bottom of the media pen where my new teammates have gathered. Of all the people to trust this to, it seems laughable that it would be me. I resisted hitting up the ‘Don for a few happy pills to take away the shakes, determined I should be my rare and dignified best for this austere event, daunted, even little old me, by the responsibility required – only now I’m here, with Leeza making little hand signals at me like we have some relationship she can trade on to be the only reporter with a boom mike allowed past the bollards and the paparazzi and the omniscient hordes of the unwashed public pulsing like an ocean of organic life unseen beyond the sodium lamps and the set dressings and the enormous palm trees in their even bigger pots.
I remember now why I nervously try and ingest almost any damned thing that might make a dent in my constitution. You’ll have to excuse me for being such a downer, but like any other poor helpless loser doomed to be his own greatest downfall, it’s really in my moments of glory that I’m my own worst enemy.
I mumble something inane and laugh and there are actually goddamn cue cards in my hand and I catch one of the bankers’ eyes and admire his black turtleneck for a moment, and then, like there’s a speck in my eye, I grin and put a thumb up to my cheek and the cards scatter, the move a deliberate one, and good old Zephyr is the only one who can drawl and get away with saying, “Well God damn, they know who they are – and if they don’t, maybe they should read their own advertising a little more,” and while they can gasp and cuss and groan and slap their foreheads and glare at Hallory and whatever, it’s me we’re talking about, this is what they’re actually paying for: Atlantic City’s most commodified man. A hero to endorsement agents and hedge funds everywhere.
Fuck ‘em. If I had any guts at all I would grasp my head and explode myself in front of the whole fucking lot.
Zephyr 5.1 “Ghosts in the Room”
THE REAL PARTY is at Transit. Somehow, they have redecorated in the last week on the strength of our opening and now there’s better light for the photographers and the top of the split level has these awesome big round tables and booth seating. The whole team except for Seeker and the robot are squeezed in there with room for Stiletto, Nautilus, Paragon, Devil Betty, Snow Leopard, the young guy who has taken on the new Grasshopper mantle, Cipher, the Lark, and this guy Coalface, who turns out to be real after all, though he has to kind of stand off to the side with his own designated bouncer who wears an asbestos jacket and clutches a fire extinguisher and keeps looking like he’s about to fall terminally ill. Nobody mentions Twilight, as if Seeker briefed them all privately before the event. And of course, no one has seen Darkstorm either, but even with Stiletto in a maudlin drunk, we manage not to dwell on it for long. The feeling of ghosts in the room is palpable, and if the young guy in the green body stocking wasn’t so damned agreeable then I don’t really know how this party would kick along at all.
But it does. Some time late into the a.m., the music is lounge jazz and the drink of choice absinthe. The conversation turns inexorably toward favorite parallel universes, eliciting more than a few laughs. I’m smoking a cigar just because it fits the moment and Kate Hudson only leaves my knee to go periodically to the bathroom to snort huge chunks of cocaine and make cell calls to sleeping journos, making sure she’s in the morning papers.
“Do you remember that one where all the malls had churches in them?” Mastodon says with a heavy-lidded sense of the ironic.
There is a tinkling of broken glass that sounds like an after-thought, but it’s enough to draw my eyes to the wider scene just as two late arrivals strut through the alcoholic haze toward our table. I’m only slightly more surprised to see my daughter than I am to see the company she’s keeping.
Shade is a good-looking, slightly macho slice of nougat-colored Afro-English woman in an 80s-style metallic jacket over a black bodysuit. Her hair’s a stark, tightly-curled triangle in silhouette, the Pyramid of Giza of women’s haircuts, with tiny little silver spheres winking from her ears. For a moment I could swear she and Tessa were holding hands, but apparently it’s just a trick of the light or an old man’s frightened imaginings. As I understand it, Shade absorbs light to make her super-strong and damage-resilient, and so the dark club atmosphere won’t be doing her any favors. Yet she has a piggish set to her strong chin that makes me instantly think she’d be a nasty piece of work when backed into a corner, powers or no powers.
She used to roll with a short-lived team inexplicably called the Spice Girls, but in recent years and after a stint in LA shacked up with femme-dom heroine Queen Bee, I think she moved back to Blighty and joined up with the Union Jacks. We’ve met two or three times before and there’s a pretty good chance, though my memory’s playing tricks on me, that once I kenned she only hearkened to girl-flesh I mightn’t’ve left the best impression. Pub-crawling (as they call it over there) with a hero of the caliber of Lionheart doesn’t leave much room for finesse, especially if you’ve got a pretty dim view of chaps already. The fact she’s now cozying up to Windsong should have me suspicious at the least – but I’m already more freaked than that.
“Hey hey, well look who it is,” Mastodon manages to drawl.
Someone should tell him he has a string of drool connected to his bull-bar, but that might undercut the chilled lothario act he seems to be aiming at my daughter.
“It’s the girl who saved Atlantic City.”
“Sheesh, it’s Shade,” I say in a somewhat too forced, loud and cheesy voice. “Gosh love,” I say and swap to my best Guy Ritchie impersonation. “What brings you down to the old watering hole?”
“Hey don’t mind me,” Shade says and nods to Jude Law as he walks past and smiles to accept the welcome from a few of the big table’s other surviving costumes as they move over to give the newcomers room for a seat
. Cypher – who I haven’t heard talking for a while and who perhaps should be checked to make sure he’s still breathing – slumps under the table and vanishes for the rest of the night.
My eyes swivel to Windsong. I am in need of lubrication, throat dry in a heartbeat. There are conversations going on at a merry pace all around us, yet the crazy hubbub still allows a tiny zone of silence to develop almost instantly and unnoticed between my daughter and I.
“Uh, hi,” or words very similar come belatedly from my mouth.
Tessa’s eyes are locked on mine and possibly she is about to say something equally awkward when Maxtor, a super-dude I haven’t seen in close to three years, crosses my line-of-sight and throws himself down next to me, ignoring the young starlet on my right.
*
LATER, AND SHADE keeps subtly trying to get my attention, but I’m wedged in by Maxtor, who has quickly confessed to me it’s been three years since he pulled on his brown-black-and-white armored suit. The New Sentinels launch inspired him to come out of retirement, but just for a night.
“How the hell could you just walk away like that?” I ask.
I had relied on this dude for back-up on more than a few occasions.
“What, officially retire? Through, like, a publicist?”
“Well that’s how it’s done,” I shrug by way of reply.
“No way, man,” Maxtor says, familiar and at once a stranger beneath his face mask and big goggles, the same way old school chums may as well be people you remember from television, ten years after the fact. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want to be like St George. Hell, like Mastodon, in fact. You know, call it quits only to show up in the old costume again next time there’s a major event or Crescendo goes on the rampage or, fuck, just because I got lonely and missed the life.”
I sniff at this otherwise completely sensible statement.
“I take it you didn’t ‘miss the life,’ then?”
I can tell he’s faintly embarrassed when he laughs awkwardly and says, “Uh, well no. Actually, I didn’t. I found something, er, actually quite a bit more rewarding.”
I’m losing interest already and Shade and Mastodon and my daughter and the Lark and Ray Liotta and a really bombed Ashley Olsen, who has come from seemingly nowhere, are talking about the time a version of the Ill-Centurion from a parallel dimension turned up in Atlantic City only to get his ass handed to him by a consortium of the city’s finest guys in tights. As they laugh and cackle and pop the tops from a few bottles of Cervesa, paparazzi are let in to take a few shots of the monolithic table with its balancing piles of martini glasses and ashtrays and empty tapas plates, and the music changes from a very insistent kind of ambient lounge to a driving, unwholesome-sounding industrial techno.
“So who’s the lucky girl?” I ask disinterestedly, the question actually meant to be the terminus for the conversation now that talking to my erstwhile old ally is more like discussing the merits of giving up cigarettes with a born-again non-smoker.
“No, no there’s no girl,” he replies. “Look Zephyr, I’d like to talk to you about it actually, but maybe now’s not the right time. I think you’d be surprised at how interested you’d be and of all my former, you know, colleagues, I think you might really get a lot out of this.”
“It’s not a pyramid scheme, is it?”
Maxtor barks a laugh, an anxious one, that doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence. He had a good memory, as far as I recall, so he shouldn’t’ve forgotten I don’t suffer fools gladly – or easily, for that matter.
I snap my gaze to Shade just at the moment Paragon says my name in that redneck voice of his that comes out when he’s drunk.
“What?” I ask and stare through the dim alcohol fug, the faces of the others bloated by their drunkenness, except for Tessa, squeezed in between Samurai Girl and Vulcana and who is eyeing me in this intense way that I cannot interpret, her mask cancelling out my parenting skills as I acknowledge I should probably be moving with far more haste to de-limit my fifteen-year-old’s involvement in this shambolic celebratory disaster, but as I said I have no idea if she is trying to signal me to get her out of there or staring daggers at me for my lightly addled state. Perhaps it’s the tranquilizers, but I suspect this is doomed to be an ongoing state-of-affairs if we don’t resolve it soon.
“I was just trying to tell that joke of yours,” Paragon bleats with the comedic skill and timing of a honking goose, “but you do it, Zephyr. It’s so funny.”
“Paragon, man, you’re bombed. What the fuck are you talking about?”
The ordinarily good-looking, gently glowing hero laughs like something from Revenge of the Nerds. It’s as if the alcohol turns him into someone from Holland.
“You said to me once, man, that if there was a parallel universe where you were in charge, all the men would be put into camps and the unit of currency would be the blowjob.”
The volume drops across the table and a second later Mastodon explodes in laughter so hard he starts choking. The nearby starlet quickly slams him on the back and in the middle of the fit – well, I dunno what happens, if it’s the young starlet or if the old guy kicks his leg or something – Mastodon explodes into his larger size and the table rocks and tips sideways and a sea of ashtrays and used nachos plates and whiskey shots and beer glasses with cigarette butts in them and stained drinks coasters and gaily-colored swizzle sticks go clattering onto the floor and I am reminded of the Hell Gate Bridge disaster and the burning cars and buses and the abandoned minivan that collected up poor dumb dead Sky Blue and took him into the river, never to be seen again.
“Come on, Paragon,” I say blithely, because of course my thoughts are a million miles away. “You’re making that up. No-one could ever make blowjobs a unit of currency. You couldn’t give them away.”
While my comment doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t matter. It’s pure Zephyr. It’s expected. So much so the laugh would’ve cued even if I’d told Paragon I wanted to cut off his arms and legs and screw his tits. This is one of the small sad truths I’ve come to acknowledge about these people long ago. Sometimes my companions are the definition of style over substance.
Only for Tessa, a la Windsong, the whole experience is new.
“Dad!” she cries, shocked, and is probably about to say a whole heap more when she realizes what she’s barked aloud and remains sitting there with her mouth now hanging open like the world’s most perfect fly trap.
The mirth dries up so fast it feels like quicksand. Mastodon eyes me and then her and slowly wipes one eye with the back of his enormous hand.
“Heh. He’s right of course,” the ‘Don says calmly like nothing’s happened. “Not much use in a currency that only flows one way.”
“What do you mean?” Paragon replies, arguing for all the world like we were talking about a possible actual world here and not a non-actual – an in fact entirely hypothetical – world mentioned in passing once in a joke I made some time that obviously registered more for Paragon than me because I am damned if I can recall it at all.
“If all the men are in prison camps, they’re hardly gonna be handing out one dollar blowjob bills, are they?”
“Just ‘cause you’re in prison doesn’t mean you don’t have blowjobs, Para,” Mastodon laughs, and the others – with the exception of Windsong, who like myself, is staring frozen across the table-top tundra unbelieving at what just happened unnoticed – burst into bright and bubbly humor yet again.
I remove the starlet’s hand from my leather-clad crotch and wriggle free of the table, shooting Windsong a glance that means business. The young newcomer clears her throat and with the frivolity around us, it hardly draws any attention that we slip out the back within seconds of each other.
Zephyr 5.2 “Up For Another Spankin’”
“JESUS CHRIST DAD, what was all that about?” Windsong snaps as she follows me around the bend to where a curving wall of black curtains obscures the service exits for the DJ booth an
d the kitchens.
“Hey, judge me for me and what I say,” I reply, “and not what some doofus like Paragon says I say.” I shake my head with controlled irritation and add, “And you need to get a handle on the whole father-daughter thing in there. You’re lucky these people have trouble hearing anything over the sounds of their own egos. All it could take is another dumb snap like that and our secret’s blown.”
“I thought ‘dumb’ was one of those no-go words for parents, you always said,” Tessa grunts dourly.
“I don’t think you’re getting that I can’t be your father here,” I say and draw right in close in case our voices should carry. “I’m Zephyr, honey. You’re Windsong. We need to manage this – manage it, and keep it separate.
“You shouldn’t even be here,” I continue. “And what’s the idea of turning up with her, for chrissakes? Do you have any idea how old that woman is? She’s been doing her thing almost as long as I’ve been doing mine.”
“I know,” Windsong replies and checks her face mask. “She’s always been one of my role models. You know. As a, uh, dyke.”
“Does she know how old you are?” I snap. “Honey. Windsong. This isn’t a fancy dress party. It’s all champagne and caviar because tomorrow we might die. Don’t you understand that? Didn’t your first little unscheduled adventure teach you anything?”
I shake my head, well aware I am losing her with my peacock’s display of frustration.
“You think this is just some opportunity to get a tumble with someone famous you’ve always admired?”
“Jesus, dad.”
She pushes me away hard because I am now way too close and there is some real force in that blow, though obviously not enough.
“I remember my last ‘little’ adventure just fine and I handled it well, thank you very much,” she says.
“Beginner’s luck.”
Zephyr II Page 14